NASA's Juno to circle Jupiter for 'planetary recipe'

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WASHINGTON: The US space agency plans to launch next week a solar-powered spacecraft called Juno that will journey to the gassy planet of Jupiter in search of how the huge, stormy giant was formed.

The $1.1 billion unmanned orbiter is scheduled for launch on August 5 - the start of a five-year odyssey toward the solar system's most massive planet in the hopes that it will be able to circle Jupiter for a period of a year.

With its fiery red eye and a mass greater than all the objects in the universe combined, Jupiter is intriguing to astronomers because it is believed to be the first planet that took shape around the Sun.

Juno aims to get closer to Jupiter than any other NASA spacecraft and will be the first to undertake a polar orbit of the planet, said Bolton.

In 1989, NASA launched Galileo, an orbiter and probe that entered the planet's orbit in 1995 and plunged into Jupiter in 2003, ending its life.

Other NASA spacecraft - including Voyager 1 and 2, Ulysses and New Horizons - have done flybys of the fifth planet from the Sun.

Its trip to Jupiter will not be a direct shot, according to Jan Chodas, Juno project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Juno then heads back toward Earth, "and we do a flyby of Earth of about 500 kilometers in October 2013, and then we slingshot ourselves out towards Jupiter arriving in July 2016."

When it gets there Juno will make use of a series of instruments, some of which were provided by European space agency partners Italy, Belgium and France, to learn about the workings of the planet and what is inside.

Two key experiments are to gauge how much water is in Jupiter and whether the planet "has a core of heavy elements at the center, or whether it is just gas all the way down".

Scientists also hope to learn more about Jupiter's magnetic fields and its big red knot, a storm that has been raging for more than 300 years. (AFP)